Hi djohnsonmediaocean, and welcome to the VMware Communities!
I have put some more effort into this, but I remain unable to find any configuration which will allow the Java 7 runtime to display correctly in Mac OS 10.7.x... It's quite possible that Java 7 is truly dependent on host hardware acceleration on Mac OS 10.7 – or that the software renderer in Mac OS 10.7 might not have the capabilities provided by that in Mac OS 10.8 – leaving our workaround with no chance of success.
I'm not an expert in OpenGL and I didn't exhaustively try all possible configurations, but everything I tried ended in failure (the original crash, or empty windows).
Sorry!
Cheers,
--
Darius